Bay Area Craigslist Rental Housing Posts

The "Bay Area Craigslist Rental Housing Posts" dataset is a comprehensive, publicly available collection of archived apartment rental listings from the San Francisco Bay Area, scraped from the Wayback Machine between September 2000 and July 2018. It includes detailed information such as rent price, number of bedrooms, square footage, location, listing date, and descriptive text, offering a rare longitudinal view of housing market dynamics across a major U.S. metropolitan region where official rental data is limited or unavailable. The dataset was compiled using custom Python scripts with BeautifulSoup and Selenium to navigate archived Craigslist pages, enabling researchers to study long-term rent trends, neighborhood-level changes, and housing affordability across the Bay Area.